by Val M Karren
“Sit down!” came the first words from my captors, “Sit down!”
I hesitated not being able to see nor feel anything to sit on. I turned my head indicating I was looking for something to sit on. A chair was shoved into the back of my knees. I collapsed abruptly with a thump on my back side on to a wooden chair, my hands still uncomfortably pinned behind me. I still said nothing. I was scared for my life.
The room’s blinds were pulled and the dots of light in my hood dimmed considerably. I was not supposed to know where I was. I felt hands around my neck, nothing threatening. The hood was yanked off with one tug from the top. When my eyes could focus in the room none of the three tried to hide their faces, nor did they shine a bright light on my face. One stood behind me ready to grab me should I try to make a break for it. One sat on a hard-backed chair almost directly in front of me and the third on a sofa with an ashtray balanced on his knee. He was just lighting up a cigarette at that moment. The tip of the paper glowed red, and then smoke came out his nostrils. He flicked his lighter closed and set it on the side table next to him. All were dressed in gray and brown suits with dingy white shirts and tasteless neckties. The one smoking had a belly. Too much alcohol, potatoes, and smoking, no doubt. All at once I recognized the fat one smoking. This was the same FSB agent I had threatened with my kitchen knife, who asked me all sorts of questions about my stay in Nizhniy while the others looked around and inspected my apartment. I couldn’t remember what the other two had looked like. I said nothing and waited.
My backpack was opened up and all the clothes pulled out of it. I saw my passport flip by and onto the floor. My plane ticket and visa as well. For some odd reason, I was relieved to see those. My address book flittered past as well. I thought of Lara for a split second. Every pocket of the bag was searched. Every pocket of the pants and shirts was searched. I had no idea of what they were looking for. I knew that there was nothing in that bag that mattered so I chose not to stress about it and watched with a curious look on my face.
“Mr. Turner. We can do this easily and quickly if you will simply tell us where the disc is,” the fat one said blowing smoke out the side of his mouth.
“As you can see, I don’t have any disc with me,” I replied like an idiot.
“You need to tell us then where you have hidden it or who has it and we will see you on the next flight to the USA,” he stated very politely.
“I don’t have any disc. I don’t have a computer to use a disc in. I have no disc and I am not hiding any disc,” I answered as resolutely as possible, trying hard to keep my voice from cracking and wobbling.
The man sitting directly in front of me slapped me hard across the face with the back of his right hand, spinning my head the other direction. The blow came so unexpectedly that I felt my eyes would fly out of their sockets. I tried to close the eye lids but instead, I just watched the room blur in front of me as my head whipped around. I waited with my face turned the other direction for a second blow. No second blow came. The left side of my face burned and ached at once.
The fat one began again, “Mr. Turner, we are professionals and will get what we want from an inexperienced goat like you. Let’s save us all a lot of time and money and in your case, teeth, and you tell us where you have hidden the disc or to whom you have sent it and we will all go together to retrieve it and you’ll be on your way. We have no interest in you for the murder. We just need the disc back.”
I could not believe what I was hearing. A murder? Not interested in me for THE murder? What murder? I didn’t kill anybody!
“I didn’t kill anybody. What are you talking about?” I asked like a mouse with his lower half caught in the vice of a trap.
“Mr. Turner. We don’t have time for games and a long interrogation. The longer that disc is unguarded, the more people’s lives are in danger, good Russian lives. If you will not help us now to recover this data then we will not stop until you do. We have our orders,” he said leaning forward from the couch to make sure his words made it to my ears.
“If I had a disc, believe me, I would have given it to you already,” I replied looking at the floor.
“Then you will need to help us to locate Mr. Sanning before we can let you go. If you do not have the disc. I’m sure that he will be so pleased with you for turning him over to us that your organization will do worse things to you than we could. It always hurts more when it comes from your own side. The shame will hurt more than our fists,” He said in a flippant, offhand manner as the agent across from me punched my face as hard as he could, lifting his backside off his chair to use his weight behind the fist. I felt the blood in my nose fill my nostrils and trickle down to my lips. I started to cry.
“Mr. Turner, you will lead us to Mr. Sanning as quickly as possible or this will continue all day long. I have two men who can hit you until tomorrow morning, taking turns for smoking breaks. It will be much easier if you give us what we need and we can all be home for dinner with the kids before the school holidays are over tomorrow!” he said again in a more vicious tone.
“Del Sanning lives just around the corner from here on Frunze Street. He’s not hard to find,” I said trying to lick blood from my lips and speak coherently.
Another blow to my face knocked me off my chair to the floor. I laid helpless on the floor bleeding on the rug. I couldn’t get myself up because of the handcuffs still holding my hands behind my back. The agent standing behind me picked me up and put me back in the chair. I was sobbing now trying to hold in the sounds of my crying. Sniffing only filled my mouth with blood. I swallowed it to try to save some dignity of spitting blood on the floor.
“Mr. Sanning disappeared from Nizhniy on the same day you disappeared. His apartment is also empty of any helpful information. He was the smart one to stay hidden. Maybe he took a private car to Moscow and is back to Virginia already and left you here take his punishments. You go underground, change your appearance, change your clothes and then you put your head above water again showing your passport after the murder and think you can just slip out of the city? I have never seen a more unprofessional operation in all my years,” he said with disgust and dismissal.
“I wasn’t hiding from the police! I was hiding from Mr. P’s thugs. Those guys don’t check passports. The clothes and the hair were to keep them from spotting me while I left town,” I sputtered.
“Why would you be hiding from Mr. P’s thugs then, because they think you killed him?” he questioned.
“I didn’t kill anybody! I just read about that an hour ago in the newspaper!” I protested looking straight at my interrogator with desperation. “I was running from him because he was trying to kill me! You know the fire bomb on Minin Street at the University? That was to get to me, to keep me quiet. He smashed up my apartment and beat me on the street on Victory Day because I found out too much information about him! When I disappeared from Nizhniy last week it was because I was running from his henchmen who were trying to pick me up again. That was last Saturday morning early. I jumped on board a boat, the Zhukov, and sailed back and forth to Volgograd. I just got back into port today at five-thirty and went straight to the train station with what was in my backpack. I didn’t know he was dead until after I had already bought my train ticket. I read it in the newspaper,” I paused my plea and took a breath, my captors seemed to be considering my story. “How could a student like me get close enough to Mr. P without his bodyguard to shoot him at point blank when he was the one looking to do me in? Why would I even hang around? It doesn’t make any sense!”
I braced myself for another punch to the face by turning and lifting my shoulder as high as possible to shield my nose and cheek bone. There was no attempt made. I opened my eyes again and looked carefully at the leader of the three to see if the reprieve was just a whim.
“What is your relationship with Mr. Sanning?” was the short, searching question.
“No relationship. I was doing some ad-hoc work for him, looking for apartments for
expats, but that project didn’t go well. We had stopped in April,” I confessed.
“Why did you stop?” he questioned further.
“Because somebody on the city council was doing something similar and had hired his own thugs to stop Del from doing the same. It’s how Russians deal with competition best. They literally cut the throat of the competition. Del told me to stop searching for apartments to rent for his and my safety.” I was singing like a canary. I thought it was a useless detail but it seemed to be very interesting to them.
“Did Sanning talk to you about Mr. P. at all?” they pressed further.
“No, I was the one who was talking with him. I was doing research on Mr. P. for my studies and would talk to Del about what I learned. Del has more experience in Russian business and he was able to help me understand what I was learning. I am the one who told him all about his hotel plans, his protection rackets, his car smuggling and his father!” I spilled it all out hoping to avoid a fourth hit to my aching, bleeding face.
“How is this possible? How could Sanning not have known about Mr. P?” a real question was asked, nothing implied, while the interrogator looked to his colleagues.
“Del always said that so many people have shadow lives and hidden agendas that they don’t just volunteer information. I learned about him from my professor and went to interview him for an academic project; that is when all my trouble started with him. He told me too much information about his financial plans for his hotel and thought he needed to shut me up. I told Del all about Mr. P. He didn’t even know who he was until I went to the night club one night.” If I was telling too much I didn’t care. I just wanted to get out alive.
“Surely Sanning was sent to Nizhniy because of Mr. P!” the fat one said again in a bit of disbelief.
“I don’t understand,” I mumbled, not understanding who would have sent Del anywhere.
“How did Sanning know how to contact Mr. P and kill him and steal the data?” I was asked.
“I don’t know. The last thing I learned about Mr. P. is that his real family name was S., not P. Del seemed to make some sort of connection when I told him that. He didn’t explain anything to me. That’s when he said I had to get out of Nizhniy as fast as I could. He said I wasn’t safe anymore. I tried to get out, but Mr. P’s men were after me and I couldn’t get to the train. So, I asked if I could stow away on the Zhukov with my friends until I found another way out!” I was so relieved not to be being punched any longer, that I would have told them every thought in my head.
The lead agent sat and scratched his chin in thought. He gave a signal to one of the junior officers who stood me up and removed my handcuffs. My wrists ached more out than in them for the first few minutes. I sat in my chair like an attentive school boy rubbing my wrists and arms waiting for the next list of exam questions.
I volunteered the next bit of information. “I thought I was only helping Del protect his hotel project by giving him this information. Del knew so much about the mafia activity in Moscow so I would tell him what Mr. P was up to and Del would help me understand the illegal activities it was hiding. I didn’t know about any data or secrets that could be stolen. I thought I had already given Del information about all the secrets that Mr. P. was hiding about his money, his family connections, his hotel plans and the rest. I don’t know about any disc or about who murdered Mr. P.”
More thoughtful looks from my interrogator and then he said softly, offhandedly, “Go clean yourself up. You look horrible,” as if it was my fault I was bleeding all over myself.
One of the henchmen showed me to the washroom but stood nearby in case I thought about bolting. Cold water on my face first stung in the cuts on my left cheek but soon it numbed the pains. Blood and water mixed and swirled down the drain. I didn’t dare look in the mirror.
While I was checking to make sure all my teeth were still in my mouth, I overheard my kidnappers talking over the information I had just shared with them. I continued running cold water trying to get my nose to stop bleeding but listened with one ear.
“How could Sanning not know it was P.? Certainly, the agency sent him here because of this family connection. How could the CIA have missed that family connection to Mr. S? Either the kid is lying to us or the agency doesn’t have good data on people outside of the Moscow circles,” said one voice.
“Perhaps Sanning was here talking with a go between and that man was making the deals with P.?” the second voice postulated, “perhaps keeping Sanning in the dark about the source.”
“Who then? We know everybody that is operating in Nizhniy. There are no Chechens here, no Uzbeks and certainly the Pakistanis and Chinese haven’t gotten this far out of the capital. We would have discovered them before the handover on Friday night,” said the first voice again.
“I still think the kid knows more than he is telling us about Sanning,” the second voice concluded.
My guard switched off the light in the washroom and told me break-time was over and I should return to my chair. I had no towel so I dried my face on my undershirt and was followed back into the living room of the apartment turned jail cell. The men were going through the contents of my backpack again, doing a more thorough search than the last time, finding nothing new.
“Please sit down,” the chief politely requested. “We have been watching you for many months and we know all of your movements except for the last week when you disappeared. You are a known associate of a foreign agent operating in the Russian Federation and for that, we could have you charged with espionage and for the procurement and transporting of state secrets compromising state security. We know of your dispute with Mr. P. and what his people did to you and your apartment, so we can establish motive and opportunity. With that and your change of appearance and trying to leave Nizhniy the day after P.’s murder, we have enough to take you to the local police and have you arrested on suspicion of his murder, at the least. The rest of the evidence we can take care of. You see Mr. Turner, you are in a very, very difficult situation. Espionage and murder charges are very serious. That is easily thirty years in a Siberian prison. Effectively a death sentence. The inmates do not tolerate traitors to Russia in prison with them. What do you have to say for yourself?"
“I have told you everything I know and what I have been doing in Nizhniy. I told you where I have been the last week and why I changed my clothes and hair and face. If you don’t believe me, I don’t know what else I can do to convince you,” I pleaded.
“Do you have any stamps in your passport of your stay someplace else? Do you have a ticket from the boat you say you were traveling on? Do you have any photographs, any souvenirs, anything to prove your whereabouts for the last week as well as the night from Friday to Saturday?” he asked me rhetorically.
“No, I don’t” I whimpered.
“Do you have any witnesses that you were with who can witness that you were with them and not shooting Mr. P. on early Saturday morning, by the way, with an American made handgun?" my interrogator had turned prosecutor.
I thought quickly about how to get in touch with the Zhukov crew. I had no phone number of how to reach Irina or Nikolai. I remembered that I had Lara’s telephone number in my book and nearly blurted it out - but decided to hold my tongue and keep her out of all this. In five minutes, they could stitch her up for trying to assassinate Boris Yeltsin.
“No, no I don’t,” I sighed.
“Your only option then, Mr. Turner, is to cooperate with us to help us find Sanning and recover the data disc that he murdered Mr. P. for,” was the ultimatum given by the head officer.
I looked at the floor in dejection with mixed and raging emotions. I knew I was completely innocent of all their made-up charges and knew I was being used. I was angry with Del for having used me for information to further his hidden agenda without informing me. I didn’t even know if Del had been in Nizhniy to build a hotel or not at this point. I understood then that Del also had layers of a shadow life too. Was he even fr
om Wyoming? Was Els his partner or his spouse? I was very confused.
“Well, Mr. Turner. Are you going to cooperate or do we turn you over to the local Militia, who by the way were on the payroll of Mr. P. and will only be more than happy to capture his killer? The killer who had disrupted a very nice flow of benefits to the chief of police and his lieutenants,” was the agent’s final proposition.
I nodded my head in despair and surrendered to his demands. I felt like a traitor even though I had no allegiance to any side in this fight. I listened to the demands on me.
“It is a simple order. You will use all of your connections and knowledge of Sanning to help us locate him and recover the stolen data. You will disclose to nobody that you are in our custody or working with us. While you cooperate, we will protect you from any revenge actions from Mr. P’s organization or his associates by keeping you hidden and watching you if it is necessary for you to leave this apartment to accomplish your orders. Is that understood?” the agent spoke this to me as if had been reading a sentence from the bench of a court room.
“Yes, it’s clear, but it may not be easy,” I muttered.
“You will have all the resources you need to get the job done. Just ask,” he replied with a polite and ironic smile.
“And what do I get in return?” I asked with some defiance.
“Mr. Turner. I already told you; Protection from Mr. P’s organization, freedom from arrest and prosecution by the local police for murder, and if you help us recover the disc, freedom from arrest and prosecution for espionage. What more could a man ask for? You certainly aren’t hoping for a cash reward! That would be very greedy, young man,” the condescension in his voice was ripe!